There are no photographs of Delia Green, a 14-year-old Black girl who was shot and killed one Christmas Eve in Savannah, Georgia. Left in Delia’s wake: her mother, who lived a block away from the crime scene; her killer, a 15-year-old Black boy she had purportedly been dating for a few months; three newspaper articles documenting her murder and the boy’s trial, bare traces of her life. Her grave would remain unmarked for 120 years. 

This is not the story most people know of Delia. You may have met her unwittingly, as I did, through Johnny Cash’s dark bass-baritone. Or you may have heard her echo in the Calypso rhythms of Blind Blake. If you’ve encountered her at all, it’s likely been through one iteration or another of an ever-shifting folk lyric—Dylan, Seeger, Belafonte—that narrates her death from the perspective of her killer. 

“Delia’s Gone,” “Little Delia,” and other songs that bear her name may have been inspired by Delia Green, but the Delia in these songs isn’t really her. Their lyrics typically paint Delia not as the child she was, but as a grown woman, often implied to be debaucherous (“Delia was a gambling girl, gambled all around”) or so unlikable she deserved to die (“She was low down and triflin’ / And she was cold and mean / Kind of evil make me want to grab my submachine”). Her race is almost never explicitly named. Until I stumbled onto the song’s origins, I assumed Delia was white, like many of the artists who sing about her. Cash’s 1994 music video features Kate Moss in the titular role; if this casting is any indication, performers and music executives similarly imagined Delia as a white woman, not a Black teen. The Delia of song was successfully severed from the Delia Green of reality, yet her musical embodiment could not have existed without the actual Delia’s corporeal death. 

Murder ballads like “Delia’s Gone” have been a staple of the American folk music tradition since at least the early 19th century, when Irish, Scottish, and English immigrants brought them to the United States. At that point, they had been sung for hundreds of years already—almost always in the aftermath of a real murder, most often from the perspective of a man who has killed a former or would-be lover. Traveling musicians would compose ballads from the scene of a public execution, spreading the grisly news of both the initial crime and the killer’s death to a largely illiterate public. 

Many have argued that early murder ballads functioned much like true crime media does today: part sensationalized journalism, part morbid public service announcement. Giving voice to these songs transformed real events into narrative, which in turn calcified into moral imperatives for would-be killers and victims alike. Songs detailing femicide warned young women away from exploring independence and extramarital sexuality, while depictions of capital punishment publicized the brutal consequences of criminal behavior. 

In the United States, murder ballads joined a sonic estuary of musical influences: early blues, folk, and other styles that would eventually become country and rock. There, they took root and evolved as American artists both reinterpreted old classics and started to pen their own songs. Many contemporary murder ballads are fictional. But many occupy the same shifting, spectral space as Delia, a true story made unrecognizable in the telling. 

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How chillingly mundane it is for a woman to be hurt or killed by someone who claims to love her. As this awareness sharpened for me, the appeal of conventional murder ballads began to curdle. I listen and wonder: does the overwhelming prevalence of femicide narratives in the genre merely represent a grim reality, or tacitly encourage it? 

Still, I find myself drawn to many of these songs despite feeling conflicted, sometimes uncomfortable. I tell myself I enjoy them as aesthetic objects, untangled from their troubling context. I am not sure this is wholly possible, or true. 

In his essay “Cathartic Warfare,” Jamil Jan Kochai reflects on the self-splitting experience of playing Modern Warfare, Call of Duty, and other military video games as an Afghan American. “By accepting the role of the American soldier while also identifying with the Afghan enemy, I fell into some ruptured space between the first-person shooter and the third-person corpse,” he writes. “I aim my rifle, the rifle of the white American subject, and I push the button, and I obliterate the Afghan, who is also myself.” 

I am drawn into Kochai’s story because he simultaneously recognizes the violent imperial fantasies that shape these games and still gets a kind of compulsive satisfaction out of playing them. The internal tension he describes is a more acute version of what I feel when I listen to certain murder ballads—not only the “guilty pleasure” of enjoying or finding humor in a morbid storyline, but the “ruptured space” of occupying the narrative perspective of both a man with a gun and the woman it is aimed at, while in actuality being neither. 

When a murder ballad is good, I can’t look away. What troubles also captivates: I am bound to it, and it won’t let go. Operating entirely through poetic subtleties, Lyle Lovett’s “L.A. County” has me in its grip every time I listen. The chorus reveals nothing about the violence to come, which is precisely why it works so well:

And the lights of L.A. County, they look like diamonds in the sky 

When you’re driving through the hours with an old friend at your side 

In the opening verse, the narrator sings of a woman he loves getting engaged to another man. The speaker’s relationship to the woman is unclear: are they exes? Friends? Does she even know him? Repeated phrases shift by just a word or two from verse to verse, the horror at the heart of the song dawning gradually. “Old friend” refers first to the woman’s fiancé, then to the narrator’s gun as he drives to her wedding. Even as he shoots both bride and groom, bleak personification obscures the bloodshed: “Well I did not say much / I just stood there watching / As that .45 told them goodbye.” 

Years after discovering “L.A. County,” the slowed-down third chorus still sends shivers down my spine. The instrumentation tells the story as much as the lyrics—the crescendo of the steel guitar, the twinkling piano that pierces through the fourth verse. The bride falls to her knees, I fall into that ruptured space. Yet even knowing how it will end, I keep coming back to the song—compelled toward its contours, toward those glistening lights. I want to encounter it, again and again. 

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The music video for Hurray for the Riff Raff’s “The Body Electric” opens on a pile of spent silver bullet casings. From the backseat of a moving car, vocalist Alynda Segarra looks out the window as they sing, calm and resigned: 

Said you’re gonna shoot me down, put my body in the river 

Shoot me down, put my body in the river 

While the whole world sings, sing it like a song 

The whole world sings like there’s nothin’ goin’ wrong 

In the murder ballad tradition, to be a woman is most often to be a rhetorical object, silent collateral in a cautionary tale. Segarra refuses this legacy first in their own voice, then by turning to the dead woman to ask for her story.

I am struck by Segarra’s use of pronouns in “The Body Electric.” From those first lines, Segarra sings in first person as the potential target of violence. They position themselves as a subject, steadily returning the would-be killer’s gaze. But the “you” they address is an expansive one: I imagine it stands in not only for whoever threatens Segarra’s narrator, but also for actual harm-doers in the world, for canonical country and folk musicians, for us as listeners. 

The second stanza echoes a more traditional murder ballad—“He shot her down, he put her body in the river”—before Segarra disrupts the form again by going to retrieve the unnamed woman. “My girl, we gotta stop this somehow,” Segarra laments, turning the “her” of “her body” into “we,” a collective body. Object becomes subject, spoken about becomes spoken to. 

Delia appears here, too, her name invoked as a stand-in for the fallen women of the murder ballad tradition. In synecdoche, she spurs Segarra’s narrator to “settle the score.” But “The Body Electric” is about more than revenge: it is a murder ballad about being uneasy with murder ballads. 

By using the form and its signifiers to critique its casual misogyny, Segarra articulates their discomfort in the genre’s own language. In this way, Segarra not only rejects the flattening trope of murdered woman as object, but the assumed centrality of male subjectivity in folk and country music—claiming space for their own perspective as a nonbinary person in the genre.

They are not symbol, but real. 

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“Alright, y’all, this is the part of the show where maybe you cry,” chirps Clover-Lynn, lead singer and banjoist of the Hellfires, to a crowd in Birmingham, Alabama. “I don’t know, I’m not you.” 

She flits through an introduction to the next song: a sentence about growing up trans in rural Virginia, followed by a tangent about union-busting in the banjo industry and a self-deprecating comment about her vocal skills. Then she closes her eyes and begins to sing: 

Oh, tell me brother, what have I done? 

I’ve gone and I’ve killed our daddy’s first son 

The venue is dead quiet, even as Clover-Lynn interrupts herself to ask her guitarist a question. Turning back to the crowd, she draws a trembling breath and sings on, somewhere on the edge of a mournful yodel. Her face is tight with concentration. 

Each verse addresses a different family member: the speaker’s brother, sister, mother, father. The narrator describes the boy’s passivity as she fatally stabs him, worries over what people will say about her when they find out. Clover-Lynn’s unadorned vibrato is spine-tingling. She conjures an increasingly unsettling feeling of tension, then punctures it with the final lines: 

Oh, tell me Daddy, will you ever forgive 

The death of your son so your daughter could live? 

In just under two minutes, Clover-Lynn devastates. Her performance is spare, imperfect, emotionally arresting. She takes the murder ballad to its least manufactured, offering it up as a container for palpable emotion that electrifies even through a low-quality fan video. The clip is haunting, cathartic. I wish I had been there to feel it in person. 

“Daddy’s First Son (Oh)” takes a common refrain from cis parents who feel they have lost their child to transition and refracts it through a trans perspective. Without saying so directly, the song insists to cis audiences that a loved one’s transition is not about them. This is a powerful redirection, and a vulnerable one. In it, Clover-Lynn makes the stakes of her own transition clear: accepting herself as a woman made it possible for her to survive. The subversion Clover-Lynn performs in her murder ballad is not the reversal of canonical gender roles, not the female narrator or the slain boy. It is that the death described is not a death at all—it is a life salvaged. 

Though queer and trans people have always existed in the South, we are often erased from the rural imaginary, even by other queer people. Clover-Lynn could have written concretely about the challenges of being trans in the rural South. But by turning to the murder ballad, she captures her experience through extended metaphor, using the tools of the very culture she is assumed to be outside of. Through her commitment to Appalachian musical traditions, Clover-Lynn asserts that her transness and her Southernness are not mutually exclusive: both parts of her belong. 

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Though no two versions are exactly the same, the lyrics of “Delia’s Gone” almost invariably cheapen the imagined Delia’s life through the eyes of her killer. “Little Delia,” meanwhile, considers his punishment. Bob Dylan’s version of “Little Delia” juxtaposes Delia’s eternity in the grave with her murderer’s fate in prison—as much of a narrative resolution as there can be while she remains underground. The former, like many murder ballads, offers a troubling ease with its narrator’s violence; the latter a dissatisfying focus on the criminal legal system as a source of justice. 

From their earliest incarnation, murder ballads have been used to argue that there is a clear line between criminals and victims. Like many narratives of violent crime, they often reinforce carceral logic, positioning prisons and policing as primary solutions to interpersonal harm. As poet Maggie Nelson observes in her memoir The Red Parts, journalists and legislators often use the “gory details” of real-life murders to justify the death penalty, putting forward a worldview in which certain people deserve to die. Reflecting on her aunt’s long-ago murder and the accused killer’s trial, Nelson is uneasy with even her own impulse to turn this violent loss into narrative fodder. She resists media and political apparatuses that “keep relying on the anger and grief of victims’ families as grounds for their agenda.” Like many survivors impacted by violent crime, there is little the prison system can offer her—even the incarceration of her aunt’s killer, she knows, would only multiply her family’s trauma.

Most murder ballads focus on crimes committed at the individual level, failing to consider violence enacted at scale or systemically. Historically, they have not made space for the complexity of an experience like Nelson’s, or many others like her. In “Billy Austin,” however, Steve Earle uses the murder ballad to illustrate the harms of mass incarceration and capital punishment, opening it to a wider range of political and ethical possibilities. 

At first glance, “Billy Austin” follows the traditional murder ballad form closely, recounting a deadly armed robbery from the assailant’s perspective. But here, this point of view doesn’t obscure, erase, or devalue the victim. Instead, it stretches the conventional moral frame of the murder ballad to empathize with victim and killer simultaneously, and ultimately to consider the harm done by the prison system itself. 

The song begins and ends on the basic facts of Billy Austin’s personhood: “My name is Billy Austin, I’m 29 years old / Born in Oklahoma, quarter Cherokee, I’m told.” Between these bookended lines, Austin’s story unfolds. First, he robs a gas station—a mundane act for him, almost casual. Only this time, for reasons unclear even to him, Austin decides to shoot the clerk. As the man lays dying, Austin turns himself in. He’s not a sympathetic narrator, exactly, but a twinge of remorse and care colors Earle’s voice as he sings “No one came a-runnin’ / so I called the cops myself.” 

The song stretches on, six minutes, all verse. With minimal variation in structure, Earle gives the song shape through subtle details in his vocal performance and gradual instrumental shifts. He laments that the murder “didn’t even make the paper,” Earle’s voice utterly flat. A single exasperated sigh conjures Austin’s public defender, defeated before the trial has even begun. Earle’s delivery in these moments makes you believe in his characters—he expertly, almost invisibly, dissolves the line between Austin and himself, drawing you into his story as if it were real. 

Waiting on death row, Austin describes his fellow inmates as “mostly Black, brown, and poor,” the closest the song gets to explicit political analysis. Then, it’s his turn to be executed—and Earle calls the justice system’s bluff. This is a death sentence, stripped of politicized rhetoric or survivors’ weaponized grief: 

When the preacher comes to get me and they shave off all my hair 

Could you take that long walk with me, knowing hell is waiting there? 

Could you pull that switch yourself, sir, with a sure, steady hand? 

Could you still tell yourself, sir, that you’re better than I am? 

In his personal views, Earle walks a fine line between prison abolition and a more narrow critique of the death penalty. But whatever Earle himself believes, “Billy Austin” makes one thing clear: the difference between what we call a “murder” and what we call an “execution” has nothing to do with morality, and everything to do with power. 

The boy who killed Delia Green was 15 years old when he sat trial, and because of his age, he was able to evade the worst legal repercussions for her murder. Instead of being put to death, he was given a life sentence, and later released on parole. 

I do not believe this was justice. But I do not believe his execution would have been justice, either. His untimely, state-sanctioned death, or his life lived in a cage—neither would have brought Delia back. Neither would have actualized the possibilities closed off to her because of his actions. 

The paradox of abolition is this: dismantling the violent structures of prisons and policing requires us to imagine beyond the paradigms that mark some human lives as disposable. Yet it also asks us to account for, repair, and prevent interpersonal harm to the best of our abilities, often using tools and processes that may not fully exist yet. Skeptics see this as the fundamental flaw of abolition as a project. Organizers see this as the work abolition calls them to practice daily. 

Long-time prison abolition organizer Mariame Kaba writes that “restoring our awareness of the humanity of prisoners is a crucial step toward undoing the harms of mass incarceration.” In one hand, we hold the irrevocable loss of Delia Green; in the other, the humanity of her killer. “Delia’s Gone” rarely encompasses both. But “Billy Austin” is evidence that the stories we tell about violent crime can change shape—they, too, can hold this radical empathy and motivate us to build alternatives. 

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Even as they mythologize their subjects, murder ballads can retrieve the unknown dead from the shadows of the archive using a practice that scholar Saidiya Hartman terms “critical fabulation.” If historical records obscure marginalized people—specifically enslaved Black women—then speculative storytelling is one way to undo this forgetting, Hartman suggests. 

Country musician and cultural historian Rhiannon Giddens takes up the mantle of critical fabulation in “Mama’s Cryin’ Long,” a murder ballad she composed from an actual slave narrative and recorded with the supergroup Our Native Daughters. Two hands clap, one drum beats, and against this syncopated backdrop Giddens leads a haunting call-and-response: “Mama’s cryin’ long (And she can’t get up) / Mama’s cryin’ long (And she can’t get up).” We watch through the eyes of an enslaved child as their mother kills her sexually abusive overseer, only to be hanged by a lynch mob for defending herself. Giddens’ lyrics, devastating in their simplicity, force us to confront the story’s central horror: not the murder itself, but the racial and sexual violence that precipitated it.

In a similar 1855 case, a young enslaved woman named Celia was put to death for killing the overseer who raped her. Mariame Kaba writes that “while Celia was not considered a person under the law and could therefore not be raped, she did have enough agency to be judged a murderess and punished for her act of resistance.” In other words, Kaba argues, Celia could not practice self-defense because white legal officials imagined her as without a self to defend. 

“Mama’s Cryin’ Long” traces the origins of this culture that punishes—rather than protects—survivors of abuse, particularly Black women. It is a lament for one lost life, and a lament for ongoing, collective harm. 

A murder ballad cannot undo the suffering or death of its subject. But by attending to the unnamed woman who inspired “Mama’s Cryin’ Long,” Giddens facilitates a speculative encounter with her selfhood, and in so doing, refutes the logic that killed her. Where “Delia’s Gone” obscures the real person at the heart of the song, “Mama’s Cryin’ Long” makes her visible—bringing to light what might otherwise stay buried. 

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What is left of the dead after we alchemize them into a cultural product? Had her killing not inspired folk ballads, Delia Green might have disappeared quietly into the horizon of history. In that universe, she is unseen—but she also survives. As it is, Delia is gone, her memory at once sustained and distorted in song. 

The musical, aesthetic, and narrative conventions of the murder ballad have hidden Delia and countless others in plain sight. But they can also bring us closer to their subjects—real or imagined—and challenge what we understand as violence, loss, and reparation. 

We sing of the dead, and our tradition is living.